Movie Review: Mother and Child

by Tony Dayoub

In contemporary cinema, Alejandro González Iñárritu (Babel) has created a whole cottage industry around melodramas starring ensemble casts in which seemingly disconnected plotlines ultimately converge to impart some moral lesson. So it is no surprise to see his name attached (as executive producer) to Mother and Child, a drama about motherhood, child abandonment, and adoption written and directed by Rodrigo García. While I'm no fan of Iñárritu's heavyhanded approach to what is already supposed to be a rather high-strung genre, what attracted me to see this film is director García, who I discovered for his sensitive attention to actors when he was writing, directing, and showrunning HBO's wonderful psychodrama In Treatment, a show so unlike any other, I once listed its serialized first season as one of the best films of 2008. Just as in that series, Mother and Child's strongest component is the acting by its uniformly spectacular cast.

Movie Review: Splice

by Tony Dayoub

Colin (Adrien Brody) and Elsa (Sarah Polley) are new parents. Both workaholics run into the typical problems most couples do when first embarking on a trip into the world of child rearing: fatigue; frustration; ambivalence about whether they're equipped to handle the responsibility; emotional disruption of their own relationship. The unexpected conception of their baby only exarcebates these feelings, leading to tension since Colin has always been the one pushing Elsa to have a child. He later discovers Elsa's reluctance is reasonable, stemming from a fear she might follow in the footsteps of her own mentally unstable mother. Which explains why Elsa is prone not only to take refuge in their work together as superstars in the world of genetic engineering, but lapse into her 'all business' scientist persona at times of stress.

Oh, did I mention their "child," Dren (Delphine Chanéac), is a hybridized clone derived from animal and human genetic splicing?

Blu-ray Roundup: The Touchstones of Character

by Tony Dayoub

A couple of last week's Blu-ray releases explore their central characters in relation to the dream world they reside in. The more obvious one of course is Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland (2010). But another one—a trilogy of westerns by Sergio Leone—surveys its respective protagonists against a subtler dreamscape. More on that one in a moment.

Dennis Hopper

by Tony Dayoub

Just a few months after I started this site, I got the opportunity to meet Dennis Hopper in New York. I had just flown in to cover the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, and attended a rare screening of a restored version of Curtis Harrington's Night Tide (1961) that evening. Hopper surprised all of us by making an appearance to give an impromptu discussion on the film, his first as a lead. As I recount elsewhere, the screening of this surreal love story between a sailor and a mermaid took a turn for the stranger due to some inadvertent rearranging of the film's second and third reel. Hopper seemed fairly irritated, but as I braced myself for the actor-director to explode in a rant derived from some bizarre melding of his photojournalist character in Apocalypse Now with Blue Velvet's deranged Frank Booth, I was instead pleasantly surprised to see the actor-director take a breath and begin to get us up to speed on the plot points we'd missed from the misplaced second reel.